Recent years have seen a growing interest in issues of ethics within feminist scholarship. As faith in the grand narratives and political projects of modernity has faltered, there has been a turn towards situated, contingent ethical frameworks. Both the philosophical basis and the political contours of these emerging frameworks are the subject of intense debate among feminists. Developments in science and technology raise new ethical dilemmas, and the demands of subaltern groups disturb old moral certainties. Across a wide range of disciplines questions of ethics are taking centre stage. This conference will be the first major international, interdisciplinary feminist conference in the United Kingdom to address these issues.

*

Keynote Speakers include:

Seyla Benhabib, Harvard University (USA);Cynthia Cockburn, City University (UK); Lynette Hunter, University of Leeds (UK); Grace Jantzen, University of Manchester (UK); Sabina Lovibond, University of Oxford (UK); Lois McNay, University of Oxford (UK); Selma Sevenhuijsen (University of Utrecht, Netherlands); Joan Tront Hunter College, CUNY (USA); Nira Yuval-Davis, University of Greenwich (UK).

We welcome short papers for parallel sessions on a range of themes including:

*

G e n d e r and moral subjectivity; the ethics of science and technology; bodily integrity; the new ethics of the public sphere; religious traditions and gender ethics; social policies and normative frameworks; intimate ethics; gender, reason and rationality; representation and ethics; violence, war and ethics; human rights, universa sm and particularism; agency, autonomy and ethics; the ethics of sex; gender, nature and animals; feminist ethical histories - abolitionism, peace, prostitution, sexual violence; the ethics of the market; postmodernism, ethics and politics; the ethics of ace and space; ethics and the politics of difference; alternative moral communities - historical, fictional, utopian.